API Guide

Realms and Organizations

There is a one to one relationship between a Realm and a SteelConnect CX Manager. The SteelConnect CX Manager acts as the controller for a the realm. A newly created realm would not have any organizations, otherwise a realm will have one or more organizations. Each oganization within a realm acts an autonomous network system. In practice, most REST API operations are performed within a specific organization.

You normally access the SteelConnect CX Manager (SCM) using a web browser.
The URL you use includes the realm and organization that you are managing and takes the form: https://realm.riverbed.cc/admin/Organization.
The Organization is case-sensistive and is also known as the organization short name, as opposed to the longname, which is more descriptive and can include spaces, and other characters.

Understanding the API

The Riverbed SteelConnect CX REST API allows HTTPS access to the SteelConnect CX Manager (SCM) via the use of GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE commands. SteelConneciton (this module) acts to simplify coding by providing an object that remembers your realm, version, and authentication and builds the HTTPS requests based on that information. A requests.session object is used to allow a single TCP connection to be re-used for all subsequent API requests.

Available Methods

SteelConneciton provides the .get, .getstatus, .post, .put, and .delete methods to simplify access to the API.
These methods will build the request to include api version, auth, etc, so you onlu need to specify the resource you are interrested in.
  • get: Used for retrieving information about a resource. Expect data to be returned.
  • getstatus: Used for retrieving current status about a resource. Expect data to be returned.
  • post: Create or deploy a new resource. Requires additional data in the payload and returns the newly created object.
  • put: Use to edit or update some existing resource. Requires additional data in the payload.
  • delete: Delete an existing resource.

A Tale of Two APIs

Riverbed divides the REST API into two APIs: * Config: used to make configurations changes and get information about SteelConnect CX resources.
https://support.riverbed.com/apis/scm_beta/scm-2.11.1/scm.config/index.html * Reporting: used to get current status information about a resource.
https://support.riverbed.com/apis/scm_beta/scm-2.11.1/scm.reporting/index.html

By nature, the Reporting API only requires the HTTP GET method, where-as the more commonly used Confg API requires GET, POST, PUT and DELETE. SteelConnection combines the two APIs by implementing .get, .post, .put, and .delete methods to access to Config API and the .getstatus method to access the Reporting API.

For example: Calling .get('/port/' + port) would retireve configuration settings on a port, where-as .getstatus('/port/' + port) would retreive the actual link state, speed, duplex, etc. for that port.

Crafting your API calls

The Riverbed documentation describes the various REST API calls that can be made.
These take the form: “HTTP Method” “resource path”.
Take the network section for example:
https://support.riverbed.com/apis/scm_beta/scm-2.11.1/scm.config/index.html#!/network:
  • GET /networks List networks.
  • GET /org/:orgid/networks Get network for an org.
  • POST /org/:orgid/networks Create network within an org.
  • DELETE /networks/:netid Delete network.
  • GET /networks/:netid Get network.
  • PUT /networks/:netid Update a network.

Within the resource path, you may see a name preceded by a colon :. These are considered variables and must be replaced with an actual value. The /networks/:netid would require the :netid be replaced with the actual network ID for the network you are requesting.

SteelConnection methods mimic the HTTP Methods and accept the short form resource paths.
To update a network, the documentation lists PUT /networks/:netid. With the SteelConnection object, you would call the put method as sc.put('/network/' +  net_id). Note that the leading / in the resource is optional as the SteelConnection object will insert it if it is missing.

Model Schema (Data Payload):

Post (create) and Put (update) requests require additional data in the form of a payload. This gets sent to the server in the form of JSON data, however the SteelConnection object will accept either JSON data or a native Python dictionary (isinstance(data, dict)). The Riverbed documentation will specify the format of the data as a “Model Schema”. Not everything listed in the model schema is required. Generally, you can determine the minimum required data by checking the equivalent function in SteelConnect CX Manager web GUI.

Retrieving Data

The SteelConnection methods leverage the popular requests package. Methods calls always return a native Python dictionary, or a list of dictionaries, depending on the API call. The requests.response object will be stored as an attribute of the object (sc.response) so the latest response is always easily accessible. By providing the full requests.response object you are free to check status and see all headers.

For example, the ‘get orgs’ request should always provide a list of orgs within the realm, so we can directly assign the result as a native Python list.
list_of_all_orgs = sc.get('orgs')

Here are the rules to determine what gets returned by an API request:

  • If response.json() is True and the ‘items’ key exists, then return a python list of response.json()[‘items’].
  • If response.json() is True and the ‘items’ key does not exist, then return a python dictionary.
  • If response.json() is False, return an empty python dictionary.